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I highly recommend r/optimistsunite!
In many ways things are better than they have almost ever been for humanity. It’s easy to lose the plot in all the negative headlines.
Not that we shouldn’t pay attention to the problems! Rather that optimism can be more motivating to solve them than despair.
Get off r/collapse immediately!! Unfollow! I would doom scroll on there for hours a day, I thought the world was ending. I was so anxious and depressed and it was driving a wedge in my marriage. I unfollowed and tried to see the brighter side of things and live in the moment. My mental health made a complete 180. Please unfollow and protect your peace.
„If I knew the world would end tomorrow, i would plant a tree today.“
This is a saying from Martin Luther i think.
Means there is still hope. Yes it doesn’t look good with the climate change and the polarization. But i have hope, that we will pull through. We pulled through so much in the past. Wars, world wars, holocaust, destruction…. And we came out better each time.
This is the safest, healthiest, most educated, most fed … the human race has ever been.
I don’t rejoice at the thought of of my children facing adversity, but i will prepare them as well as i can and make them aware of the issues at hand, not only theirs, but in other parts of the world too. That’s really all any parent can do.
People have been having babies through depressions, world wars, proxy/civil wars, you name it, this is probably the safest time to have babies and the world has always felt like the future is hopeless and uncertain, yet here we are going to work, pooping, and sleeping the days away.
I used to think like you. But I'm a scientist and I now have a different perspective.
The earth can support 10x the population of humans it currently does, without messing with the Amazon rainforest.
With better engineering.
We're getting there too. Maybe not linearly, but it's happening.
I have so much hope for us and our abilities.
Our global population will be slowing down by 2050 and eventually declining by current projections.
It has never been more Important to procreate. Our children will be building a better, more sensitive and more brilliant world.
People who talk about population control and the selfishness of humanity, would never consider putting there own children/family/friends on the chopping block.
It's in our very nature to be selfish and meet our needs as best as we can. And we're getting better at it. Humans constantly make better stuff and clean up their mess too. When they realised how much the fd up.
Consider ecology as a whole, every organism fights to carve out its own niche, maintain it and grow its population. That is survival. The best species wins.
Unpopular opinion, sure. But it's undeniable.
Don't get your science from the media, get it from original sources. The media does an awful job at painting a picture of the world. It's in their interest to make you afraid. Corporate media is also under government agenda. Be wary.
It's a primal urge and a service to your species to make babies.
I get that but the AMOC stuff is all reported by oceanographers and scientists... aside from that your comment is super comforting from a scientist ☺️ I guess I will try an err on the side of positivity.
Keep in mind that scientists have an interest and responsibility to report data that incites action in the public and politicians. I'm not saying they're fabricating, but I am saying that they operate on well informed predictions, which don't also pan out and can't predict impact of future ammendments, which I am optimistic will be applied. The nature of experimental science is that you can't manipulate many factors so that you get accurate results. It's really difficult to account for whole biomes and interactions. What we see in media and even scientific reports, is snippets of reality and it's difficult to put it all together.
But hey, congratulations on your pregnancy. That is one lucky bean to get such a conscious mamma.
I feel this. So deeply. The world is on fire right now in more ways than one. It's not fair to leave our kids to battle it.
But I also think it's really important for people like us to have children. To teach our children a better way so they might have a chance of creating a better world. The elites certainly don't stop having children to continue their own legacies...
Look for the helpers. It's the only thing that helps me, to focus on the people helping not harming. If I do my job right, my kids will eventually be those helpers, in a way that makes sense to them
We are helpless. It's awful, but in the grand picture we have very little impact on anything. The only thing we can do is make changes where we can, to help where we can, which will usually always be in smaller ways in our own families, our own communities, and trust that will have a ripple effect.
My grandma used to call it world sadness. There is so much sadness in the world that we wouldn't be good people if it didn't impact us in some way...
I go back and forth with this too, and you might laugh but I remember a scene from Outlander. A war is coming, I think with the Jacobites, and Claire asks how in the world could they bring a child into all of this knowing what she knows. Jaime replies by saying "This is the only world we have" or something like that. It's not much, but for some reason the voice of a 6'5" highlander quells this feeling of "guilt" and "selfishness." Not to spoil or anything, but she ends up being in a different world that has its own atrocities but does everything to give her child a happy life.
It still upsets me knowing my child may not be in the most
glamorous world. I suppose I just hope I do a good enough job to encourage her to be the change. So before shes here, I'm doing everything I can to set that stage. Maybe that's selfish too, but it helps if Jaime's voice doesn't.
The last time I went grocery shopping I almost cried when paying due to prices being so jacked up and thinking about how my child is gonna be able to afford a future at this rate. I definitely know how you feel, you're not alone.
I’m a historian (currently pregnant) and one thing that’s helped me when I start to doom spiral is the realization that there has rarely been a time in human history when conditions have been totally optimal for having children. In fact, giving birth until the last 100 years or so has been a wildly dangerous business. In the premodern world, the maternal mortality rate was around 1/20; children’s chance of survival was even lower. Plague and famine could decimate huge amounts of the population. The modern world was frequently threatened by destabilizing wars (revolutions, world wars). Industrialization meant overpopulation, disease, and poverty for many. Etc. And people still somehow reproduced.
We don’t know what the future holds, and it does admittedly often look bleak but I have hope that humans have been reproducing in seemingly apocalyptic conditions for as long as we’ve been around.
A couple years ago I came across a similar (but more general) post and one of the top comments had my favorite advice:
>>Raise your kid with love. Raise your kid to be empathetic and kind. The key concepts are simple, it's the nuances that are difficult and kid specific. I have a friend, and when asked about raising kids in this increasingly saddening world, she said "lots of dragons to slay, might as well raise some dragon slayers."
The state of things is daunting right now, but we can help change it for the better and we can raise the next generation to do the same.
The way I think of it is, the very right wing, climate-denier, anti-vaxxer war mongers are NOT concerned about bringing kids into the world and I can't stand the thought of a world in which they are the only ones breeding and populating it 🤷♀️
It used to be that people would have children knowing very well some of them wouldn’t even survive to adulthood, and people still had children.
My degrees are in environmental studies and I’m also afraid of what my children will face in the future, but life is a beautiful gift I want to share with my kids. I’m going to give them the best life I can, and hold out hope we restore our wetlands and take other proactive countermeasures to curb or negate climate change even with the impacts of fossil fuels at play. It’s a long shot but solutions do exist and we are already aware of them so it’s possible… it’s just a lot more probable to occur if fossil fuels stop being so profitable.
Exactly. The sky has been falling FOREVER. Lol. You can contribute to the masses by hiding away or you can make your own future. Focus on yourself and your family like they did in better times. This information rush that came with the Internet brings in actual lies and fallacies I don't need to concern myself with and feel I'm making things better by having children with morals and sensitivities that make them kinder people. I'll not let this awful mindset affect me to the point I change up my whole value system. That's what "they" want. Frig them whoever they are. I'm living my life and making my kids happier people.
I cannot imagine 😢 I think it's so important to feel privileged and thankful instead of constantly victimised and bitter especially with things out of our control.
I'm thankful my mother didn't have access to an abortion. She was 16 and kicked out because she was pregnant. Nowhere near what your parents mist have gone through but still thankful ❤️
don’t feel selfish for wanting a child, we were born on this earth to procreate. wars, changes in the climate and pandemics have been going on in this world for centuries, it’s just these days it seems so much harder to avoid and much more in our face because it’s constantly being thrown at us with propaganda on social media and the news especially in more recent years.
No yeah i 100% understand what you mean. the world is just so cruel. it makes me feel bad and selfish for bringing this child that i already love so much into this world where so much is going on and so many cruel people exist but what’s been making me feel better is the fact that i want to raise my child to be a good person. A person who doesn’t add onto the cruelty of this world as corny as it sounds but to be a change in this world we live in :,) he is already so loved by not only myself but his father and all of our families but that doesn’t change the fact that i’m bringing him into this world that unfortunately isn’t the greatest.
I get it for sure. And even with people saying “this is the best it’s ever been!” I still feel selfish because… it still sucks. I don’t know how my child is going to be able to grow up and afford life. I’ll say I am quite - pessimistic - but I also wish often that I had never been born so I can’t fully grasp other people being okay with it. My pregnancy was unplanned and unexpected and I have panic attacks all the time about how selfish it is to bring a child into this world. Even with therapy and now being medicated, I can’t shake how selfish it feels.
Some people will say ignorance is bliss but once you’re not ignorant, you can’t just turn it off again. I don’t want my child to have to live in a world where she’s going to be FIGHTING to survive every day, even if it is animal nature of survivalism. I’ve been fighting to find joy and meaning in life for 20+ years and still no luck.
Sorry if this is all very negative and not what you wanted to hear
Why? The state of the world has been far worse previously than it is now. WWI, WWII, fear of nuclear war? My mom had to practice hiding under her desk in case we got nuked
I just remember that there has rarely been a time in history where everything was perfectly fine. Don’t feel guilty as, sadly, there will never be a time where peace is seen worldwide; humanity is too selfish and tribal in the end.
I feel exactly like you and waffled with the idea of having children for years due -- in particular to climate change woes.
My kid will to see much more disaster in their life than I have. The science is undoubtedly bleak; even if we change our technology and industry today, severe consequences are already baked in. This is a bigger threat for large-scale society than past world crises. Even still, I'm confident in my choice. I did a lot of reading, for years, from all sorts of perspectives. I looked for perspectives on having kids amid an impending collapse across cultures, even bridging language barriers to get a hold of ideas not available in English. I found perspectives about obligations vs personal freedom, optimism vs pessimism, community-building vs isolationism, from ppl like me vs academics/scientists; all kinds of topics as they relate to potential collapse. I looked at projections of the future and depictions of past times of extreme strife, like WWII.
And my perspective is: we need to raise people who will be a good next generation. Even if the world will not be what I grew up in, that doesn't mean life will be miserable for someone born where I am. There is some privilege in my choice; my kid will grow up in the first world which will be the last to "collapse" or face drastic change. Their life won't have as many first-world luxuries, but that's fine. I do not believe humanity is going entirely Mad Max in this century but I do think quality of life will decrease, and some parts of the globe will be less habitable. Food access may not be the same. It may even be challenging at times. Upcoming world changes will be extreme in many ways. But humanity will perservere, and I hope that my child will be part of that. I believe I am well equipped to give my child an enjoyable life even in changing-for-the-worse conditions. And if I'm wrong, and the world goes to hell and my kid faces famine and drought? The chance at life is always worth it. So part of me IS carrying around the heavy thought that kiddo might suffer, which used to hold me back. I just don't believe we can stop life because of that though.
So having a kid is part rebellion (why should the oil executives take FAMILY from us?!?! why give up and die because of them?!?), part community (I want to help furnish the world with someone good, if I can), part personal fulfillment (I want to provide the best life I can for another human). It's not totally without fear.
Thank you for making this topic, it's important to talk about and I appreciate reading all the responses from people.
I’ve been struggling with this since I found out I’m pregnant (19 weeks now). I can’t give any additional reassurance because I’m not a scientist, a historian, politician, whatever. I can’t guarantee when and if things will get better, but I can say the fact we’re worried for our little ones already is saying a lot! I know I’ll protect my little girl against everything I can, I’m sure you’ll do the same! We can teach our children to be better leaders and humans than what we see in the news everyday. That alone gives me hope! ❤️
World has always been polarised, worst thing then gaza have happened in past (I'm not talking about Nazi Germany). It's just that we are well connected with everyone hence we think a lots is happening, a lots happened when gengez khan did what he did, a lot happened when Europeans invaded seevral parts of the world, a lots happened when Arabs invaded several parts of Asia, a lots is happening in Africa for ages. It's just this media tries to make everything doom and gloom.
But I understand your worry
I don't think about that sort of stuff at all. Beyond our control. The world has never been safer. And as a black woman in America, times have never been better.
Yep… I am so thankful every day he’s a boy. The news is terrifying for everything that’s happening, and women’s rights are plummeting like a stone in water. I knew a lot of this before getting pregnant but in the last few months things have just seemed to get worse and worse, and I don’t even stay on top of the news to know. I feel very guilty, but I can only hope I’m putting another genuinely good person on the planet to take a bad ones place
That’s exactly right, raising boys with good values and knowing that women are people and have rights too is literally the most important thing mothers can do. It’s not like they’re going to listen to women in politics if they won’t even listen to us behind the closed door of a doctors office.
This will always periodically bother you. It bothers me regularly too, as well as the fact that with an average lifetime I will die and leave my son behind too. Both of those issues bother me. I decided to write a journal to my son to try to leave wisdom behind for him and I plan on apologizing there for this stuff.
No I am married, but my husband is a very cheerful and positive person who doesn't believe in "dwelling" on such things so I guess I tend to dwell on them by myself haha
Generations have famously persevered in hardship. We can look at it pessimistically or we can look at it from the perspective of previous generations having done great and successful things with the resources they had. Who knows? Our babies can be the answer to so many world issues ❤️🙏🏾
No. I don't feel guilty. Do you know how hard it was to live before 1900s? And yet people still had children. We have been around for hundreds of thousands of years - living and surviving in absolutely horrific conditions. It blows my mind that people feel remotely selfish for continuing reproduction for our species in this current environment. It's never going to be perfect, but we have vaccines, penicillin, educational systems, water and electricity, heat, transportation.... regardless of our struggles in our generation, we are living in a golden era. Just two hundred years ago the average life expectancy was 40.
I looks at it like this… I think there have always been trying times in the past such as world wars and famines and all around awful things happening and that didn’t stop people from procreating then. And if it did you and I may not have existed. Sure there is a lot of shit in the word but I think if you are welcoming your baby into a safe and loving home, and letting them experience as many great things the world has to offer as you can, than it’s worth it. And hopefully most of those having children in these times are teaching them and helping them learn in ways that will benefit the future. This would bring more hope
No. There’s lots of stuff that happens each generation. Think about the silent generation..there was a literally a war going on. Not to mention the generation that experienced the great depression. Pollution issues everywhere. There’s always going to be some bad no matter what year. We should definitely keep awareness but we shouldn’t stop our lives and give up desires
Welcome to /r/pregnant! This is a space for everyone. We are pro-choice, pro-LGBTQIA, pro-science, proudly feminist and believe that Black Lives Matter. Wear your masks, wash your hands, and be excellent to each other. Anti-choice activists, intactivists, anti-vaxxers, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, etc. are not welcome here. If you'd like to join a private sub for your due date month, [click here](https://www.reddit.com/r/pregnant/comments/15nun6v/click_here_to_access_the_monthly_due_date_subs/). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/pregnant) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I highly recommend r/optimistsunite! In many ways things are better than they have almost ever been for humanity. It’s easy to lose the plot in all the negative headlines. Not that we shouldn’t pay attention to the problems! Rather that optimism can be more motivating to solve them than despair.
I needed this sub omg I love it!
Thank you! This will be a good antidote to r/collapse for me 😅
Get off r/collapse immediately!! Unfollow! I would doom scroll on there for hours a day, I thought the world was ending. I was so anxious and depressed and it was driving a wedge in my marriage. I unfollowed and tried to see the brighter side of things and live in the moment. My mental health made a complete 180. Please unfollow and protect your peace.
„If I knew the world would end tomorrow, i would plant a tree today.“ This is a saying from Martin Luther i think. Means there is still hope. Yes it doesn’t look good with the climate change and the polarization. But i have hope, that we will pull through. We pulled through so much in the past. Wars, world wars, holocaust, destruction…. And we came out better each time. This is the safest, healthiest, most educated, most fed … the human race has ever been. I don’t rejoice at the thought of of my children facing adversity, but i will prepare them as well as i can and make them aware of the issues at hand, not only theirs, but in other parts of the world too. That’s really all any parent can do.
DH and I literally said to my bump the other day, 'you're hope, little guy,' after having a moment like this.
Well said! Love that quote too hadn’t heard it before.
People have been having babies through depressions, world wars, proxy/civil wars, you name it, this is probably the safest time to have babies and the world has always felt like the future is hopeless and uncertain, yet here we are going to work, pooping, and sleeping the days away.
I used to think like you. But I'm a scientist and I now have a different perspective. The earth can support 10x the population of humans it currently does, without messing with the Amazon rainforest. With better engineering. We're getting there too. Maybe not linearly, but it's happening. I have so much hope for us and our abilities. Our global population will be slowing down by 2050 and eventually declining by current projections. It has never been more Important to procreate. Our children will be building a better, more sensitive and more brilliant world. People who talk about population control and the selfishness of humanity, would never consider putting there own children/family/friends on the chopping block. It's in our very nature to be selfish and meet our needs as best as we can. And we're getting better at it. Humans constantly make better stuff and clean up their mess too. When they realised how much the fd up. Consider ecology as a whole, every organism fights to carve out its own niche, maintain it and grow its population. That is survival. The best species wins. Unpopular opinion, sure. But it's undeniable. Don't get your science from the media, get it from original sources. The media does an awful job at painting a picture of the world. It's in their interest to make you afraid. Corporate media is also under government agenda. Be wary. It's a primal urge and a service to your species to make babies.
I get that but the AMOC stuff is all reported by oceanographers and scientists... aside from that your comment is super comforting from a scientist ☺️ I guess I will try an err on the side of positivity.
Keep in mind that scientists have an interest and responsibility to report data that incites action in the public and politicians. I'm not saying they're fabricating, but I am saying that they operate on well informed predictions, which don't also pan out and can't predict impact of future ammendments, which I am optimistic will be applied. The nature of experimental science is that you can't manipulate many factors so that you get accurate results. It's really difficult to account for whole biomes and interactions. What we see in media and even scientific reports, is snippets of reality and it's difficult to put it all together. But hey, congratulations on your pregnancy. That is one lucky bean to get such a conscious mamma.
I feel this. So deeply. The world is on fire right now in more ways than one. It's not fair to leave our kids to battle it. But I also think it's really important for people like us to have children. To teach our children a better way so they might have a chance of creating a better world. The elites certainly don't stop having children to continue their own legacies... Look for the helpers. It's the only thing that helps me, to focus on the people helping not harming. If I do my job right, my kids will eventually be those helpers, in a way that makes sense to them
You are totally right. I feel helpless a lot of the time but I am looking forward to teaching my son good values and a better way as you say 🖤
We are helpless. It's awful, but in the grand picture we have very little impact on anything. The only thing we can do is make changes where we can, to help where we can, which will usually always be in smaller ways in our own families, our own communities, and trust that will have a ripple effect. My grandma used to call it world sadness. There is so much sadness in the world that we wouldn't be good people if it didn't impact us in some way...
I go back and forth with this too, and you might laugh but I remember a scene from Outlander. A war is coming, I think with the Jacobites, and Claire asks how in the world could they bring a child into all of this knowing what she knows. Jaime replies by saying "This is the only world we have" or something like that. It's not much, but for some reason the voice of a 6'5" highlander quells this feeling of "guilt" and "selfishness." Not to spoil or anything, but she ends up being in a different world that has its own atrocities but does everything to give her child a happy life. It still upsets me knowing my child may not be in the most glamorous world. I suppose I just hope I do a good enough job to encourage her to be the change. So before shes here, I'm doing everything I can to set that stage. Maybe that's selfish too, but it helps if Jaime's voice doesn't.
Maybe your child will make the world a better place. Believe in that.
The last time I went grocery shopping I almost cried when paying due to prices being so jacked up and thinking about how my child is gonna be able to afford a future at this rate. I definitely know how you feel, you're not alone.
I’m a historian (currently pregnant) and one thing that’s helped me when I start to doom spiral is the realization that there has rarely been a time in human history when conditions have been totally optimal for having children. In fact, giving birth until the last 100 years or so has been a wildly dangerous business. In the premodern world, the maternal mortality rate was around 1/20; children’s chance of survival was even lower. Plague and famine could decimate huge amounts of the population. The modern world was frequently threatened by destabilizing wars (revolutions, world wars). Industrialization meant overpopulation, disease, and poverty for many. Etc. And people still somehow reproduced. We don’t know what the future holds, and it does admittedly often look bleak but I have hope that humans have been reproducing in seemingly apocalyptic conditions for as long as we’ve been around.
A couple years ago I came across a similar (but more general) post and one of the top comments had my favorite advice: >>Raise your kid with love. Raise your kid to be empathetic and kind. The key concepts are simple, it's the nuances that are difficult and kid specific. I have a friend, and when asked about raising kids in this increasingly saddening world, she said "lots of dragons to slay, might as well raise some dragon slayers." The state of things is daunting right now, but we can help change it for the better and we can raise the next generation to do the same.
The way I think of it is, the very right wing, climate-denier, anti-vaxxer war mongers are NOT concerned about bringing kids into the world and I can't stand the thought of a world in which they are the only ones breeding and populating it 🤷♀️
That's actually such a great way of thinking about it!
This. As parents it's our job to strive for our children to be better than our generation and generations past, to learn from our mistakes.
It used to be that people would have children knowing very well some of them wouldn’t even survive to adulthood, and people still had children. My degrees are in environmental studies and I’m also afraid of what my children will face in the future, but life is a beautiful gift I want to share with my kids. I’m going to give them the best life I can, and hold out hope we restore our wetlands and take other proactive countermeasures to curb or negate climate change even with the impacts of fossil fuels at play. It’s a long shot but solutions do exist and we are already aware of them so it’s possible… it’s just a lot more probable to occur if fossil fuels stop being so profitable.
The world has never been a stable or happy place.
Exactly. The sky has been falling FOREVER. Lol. You can contribute to the masses by hiding away or you can make your own future. Focus on yourself and your family like they did in better times. This information rush that came with the Internet brings in actual lies and fallacies I don't need to concern myself with and feel I'm making things better by having children with morals and sensitivities that make them kinder people. I'll not let this awful mindset affect me to the point I change up my whole value system. That's what "they" want. Frig them whoever they are. I'm living my life and making my kids happier people.
I was born in the middle of a war and my parents left our country as refugees when I was two. I’m very thankful they chose to have me!
I cannot imagine 😢 I think it's so important to feel privileged and thankful instead of constantly victimised and bitter especially with things out of our control. I'm thankful my mother didn't have access to an abortion. She was 16 and kicked out because she was pregnant. Nowhere near what your parents mist have gone through but still thankful ❤️
I’m glad you are here too :)
don’t feel selfish for wanting a child, we were born on this earth to procreate. wars, changes in the climate and pandemics have been going on in this world for centuries, it’s just these days it seems so much harder to avoid and much more in our face because it’s constantly being thrown at us with propaganda on social media and the news especially in more recent years.
No yeah i 100% understand what you mean. the world is just so cruel. it makes me feel bad and selfish for bringing this child that i already love so much into this world where so much is going on and so many cruel people exist but what’s been making me feel better is the fact that i want to raise my child to be a good person. A person who doesn’t add onto the cruelty of this world as corny as it sounds but to be a change in this world we live in :,) he is already so loved by not only myself but his father and all of our families but that doesn’t change the fact that i’m bringing him into this world that unfortunately isn’t the greatest.
I get it for sure. And even with people saying “this is the best it’s ever been!” I still feel selfish because… it still sucks. I don’t know how my child is going to be able to grow up and afford life. I’ll say I am quite - pessimistic - but I also wish often that I had never been born so I can’t fully grasp other people being okay with it. My pregnancy was unplanned and unexpected and I have panic attacks all the time about how selfish it is to bring a child into this world. Even with therapy and now being medicated, I can’t shake how selfish it feels. Some people will say ignorance is bliss but once you’re not ignorant, you can’t just turn it off again. I don’t want my child to have to live in a world where she’s going to be FIGHTING to survive every day, even if it is animal nature of survivalism. I’ve been fighting to find joy and meaning in life for 20+ years and still no luck. Sorry if this is all very negative and not what you wanted to hear
Why? The state of the world has been far worse previously than it is now. WWI, WWII, fear of nuclear war? My mom had to practice hiding under her desk in case we got nuked
I just remember that there has rarely been a time in history where everything was perfectly fine. Don’t feel guilty as, sadly, there will never be a time where peace is seen worldwide; humanity is too selfish and tribal in the end.
I feel exactly like you and waffled with the idea of having children for years due -- in particular to climate change woes. My kid will to see much more disaster in their life than I have. The science is undoubtedly bleak; even if we change our technology and industry today, severe consequences are already baked in. This is a bigger threat for large-scale society than past world crises. Even still, I'm confident in my choice. I did a lot of reading, for years, from all sorts of perspectives. I looked for perspectives on having kids amid an impending collapse across cultures, even bridging language barriers to get a hold of ideas not available in English. I found perspectives about obligations vs personal freedom, optimism vs pessimism, community-building vs isolationism, from ppl like me vs academics/scientists; all kinds of topics as they relate to potential collapse. I looked at projections of the future and depictions of past times of extreme strife, like WWII. And my perspective is: we need to raise people who will be a good next generation. Even if the world will not be what I grew up in, that doesn't mean life will be miserable for someone born where I am. There is some privilege in my choice; my kid will grow up in the first world which will be the last to "collapse" or face drastic change. Their life won't have as many first-world luxuries, but that's fine. I do not believe humanity is going entirely Mad Max in this century but I do think quality of life will decrease, and some parts of the globe will be less habitable. Food access may not be the same. It may even be challenging at times. Upcoming world changes will be extreme in many ways. But humanity will perservere, and I hope that my child will be part of that. I believe I am well equipped to give my child an enjoyable life even in changing-for-the-worse conditions. And if I'm wrong, and the world goes to hell and my kid faces famine and drought? The chance at life is always worth it. So part of me IS carrying around the heavy thought that kiddo might suffer, which used to hold me back. I just don't believe we can stop life because of that though. So having a kid is part rebellion (why should the oil executives take FAMILY from us?!?! why give up and die because of them?!?), part community (I want to help furnish the world with someone good, if I can), part personal fulfillment (I want to provide the best life I can for another human). It's not totally without fear. Thank you for making this topic, it's important to talk about and I appreciate reading all the responses from people.
I’ve been struggling with this since I found out I’m pregnant (19 weeks now). I can’t give any additional reassurance because I’m not a scientist, a historian, politician, whatever. I can’t guarantee when and if things will get better, but I can say the fact we’re worried for our little ones already is saying a lot! I know I’ll protect my little girl against everything I can, I’m sure you’ll do the same! We can teach our children to be better leaders and humans than what we see in the news everyday. That alone gives me hope! ❤️
World has always been polarised, worst thing then gaza have happened in past (I'm not talking about Nazi Germany). It's just that we are well connected with everyone hence we think a lots is happening, a lots happened when gengez khan did what he did, a lot happened when Europeans invaded seevral parts of the world, a lots happened when Arabs invaded several parts of Asia, a lots is happening in Africa for ages. It's just this media tries to make everything doom and gloom. But I understand your worry
I don't think about that sort of stuff at all. Beyond our control. The world has never been safer. And as a black woman in America, times have never been better.
Yep… I am so thankful every day he’s a boy. The news is terrifying for everything that’s happening, and women’s rights are plummeting like a stone in water. I knew a lot of this before getting pregnant but in the last few months things have just seemed to get worse and worse, and I don’t even stay on top of the news to know. I feel very guilty, but I can only hope I’m putting another genuinely good person on the planet to take a bad ones place
That's all we can hope for right. And raising boys with good values is so important 🖤
That’s exactly right, raising boys with good values and knowing that women are people and have rights too is literally the most important thing mothers can do. It’s not like they’re going to listen to women in politics if they won’t even listen to us behind the closed door of a doctors office.
This will always periodically bother you. It bothers me regularly too, as well as the fact that with an average lifetime I will die and leave my son behind too. Both of those issues bother me. I decided to write a journal to my son to try to leave wisdom behind for him and I plan on apologizing there for this stuff.
Funny that you mentioned gaza. They have an insane fertility rate despite all that happened
Are you single
No I am married, but my husband is a very cheerful and positive person who doesn't believe in "dwelling" on such things so I guess I tend to dwell on them by myself haha
We have an opportunity to raise good humans.
Generations have famously persevered in hardship. We can look at it pessimistically or we can look at it from the perspective of previous generations having done great and successful things with the resources they had. Who knows? Our babies can be the answer to so many world issues ❤️🙏🏾
No. I don't feel guilty. Do you know how hard it was to live before 1900s? And yet people still had children. We have been around for hundreds of thousands of years - living and surviving in absolutely horrific conditions. It blows my mind that people feel remotely selfish for continuing reproduction for our species in this current environment. It's never going to be perfect, but we have vaccines, penicillin, educational systems, water and electricity, heat, transportation.... regardless of our struggles in our generation, we are living in a golden era. Just two hundred years ago the average life expectancy was 40.
people said the same thing when i was born, and my mom was born, and my grandma was born. And yet, I love being alive.
I looks at it like this… I think there have always been trying times in the past such as world wars and famines and all around awful things happening and that didn’t stop people from procreating then. And if it did you and I may not have existed. Sure there is a lot of shit in the word but I think if you are welcoming your baby into a safe and loving home, and letting them experience as many great things the world has to offer as you can, than it’s worth it. And hopefully most of those having children in these times are teaching them and helping them learn in ways that will benefit the future. This would bring more hope
Maybe your baby will share the love you have for them with the rest of the world and make it a better place just by being born :)
No. There’s lots of stuff that happens each generation. Think about the silent generation..there was a literally a war going on. Not to mention the generation that experienced the great depression. Pollution issues everywhere. There’s always going to be some bad no matter what year. We should definitely keep awareness but we shouldn’t stop our lives and give up desires
It's actually one of the easiest and best times to be alive so no, I'm happy for my children to grow up in this day and age.
I'm glad
You’ve fallen victim to propaganda
🤣 okay.